Friday, December 4, 2009

Welcome Geocachers!

A big welcome to those who came to the site due to the addendum to the Weekly Mailer. My hope is that you will find this to be a fun activity for you. Or at the very least you can follow our fumbles as we attempt to locate the balloons before the rest of the Internet. (good luck)

Some quick tidbits:

From the DARPA site, all balloons are scheduled to go on display at all locations at 10:00 AM (ET) until approximately 4:00 PM (local time) on Saturday, December 5, 2009. The launches will occur simultaneously across the country. Balloons will come down at approximately 4:00 PM. (This means I'm getting up early)

Balloons are numbered and each number hangs beneath the balloon. Thanks to the mad CSS skills of our fellow Lackey, Thom, and our designer Mike, the balloons in this blog will fill in red as we verify their locations. Verification will be key for each balloon since we expect a lot of misinformation on the Internet. You'll know each balloon number as we find them but not the location.

We'll be using various tools to get the word out about our progress. Some we'll create and quickly dump if they don't work. Some we'll use internally to manage and disseminate information.

We'll share a little but we do want to keep some information from being broadly known. So we're not planning to be transparent. We'll be more, uh, translucent.

15 comments:

Just be careful with the submission guys, DARPA rules did say only individuals can submit and not groups... I'd hate to see it get blown because of a small thing like that... but that said, I totally agree with what was said in a prior post... if any group can get all the co-ordinates for all 10 balloons, I think it's us cachers!

I've got a good chunk of So. Cal. covered - can see lots of L.A. and Orange Counties from the hill near where I live. I'll be up early Saturday. Geocaching is always a new adventure. Go for it, all you cachers out there!

I'm sure you have given a lot of thought to verification, but would it make sense to e-mail "trusted" cachers in the area of reported sightings to get a confirmation of location? (With purposely and announced errors in coordinates to keep competing groups from using geocaching sightings for their own purposes? How far away can you see these balloons?)

Projects Funded @DonorsChoose

About Groundspeak

Groundspeak is a 9 year old company that owns and operates Geocaching.com. Geocaching is a high-tech treasure hunting game played throughout the world by adventure seekers equipped with GPS devices. The basic idea is to locate hidden containers, called geocaches, outdoors and then share your experiences online.